Daily Archives: April 28, 2014

We all have parts of ourselves that need working on. We all think thoughts that aren’t the best thoughts we could be thinking. We all do things we wish we would have done better, or differently, or not at all. We all make mistakes, every single day….every single one of us. And then, we all wake up every day with lots of chances to start over. It is one of the miracles of life…Let yesterday go, be done with it. Walk onto your light-filled path and make today a better day.

The opposite of samsara (the cycle of suffering) is when all the walls fall down, when the cocoon completely disappears and we are totally open to whatever may happen, with no withdrawing, no centralizing into ourselves. That is what we aspire to, the warrior’s journey. That is what stirs us: leaping, being thrown out of the nest, going through the initiation rites, growing up, stepping into something that’s uncertain and unknown.

For some reason, we are truly convinced that if we criticize ourselves, the criticism will lead to change. If we are harsh, we believe we will end up being kind. If we shame ourselves, we believe we end up loving ourselves. It has never been true, not for a moment, that shame leads to love. Only love leads to love.

For me, going home meant returning to the work of writing because writing was my home, because I loved writing more than I hated failing at writing, which is to say that I loved writing more than I loved my own ego, which is ultimately to say that I loved writing more than I loved myself. And that’s how I pushed through it.

And,

Your home is whatever in this world you love more than you love yourself. So that might be creativity, it might be family, it might be invention, adventure, faith, service, it might be raising corgis, I don’t know, your home is that thing to which you can dedicate your energies with such singular devotion that the ultimate results become inconsequential.

26. Wisdom from Kristin Noelle, who describes so perfectly where I am right now,

…those stretches when you’re still close enough to some “before” version of yourself to remember him or her well, to still have his or her knee-jerk feelings and reactions to things….but you’re not that version of yourself anymore either, and you’re noticing a whole new paradigm, a whole new way of being in the world, vying for attention and time.